Transition
by Jayde
Summary: Remus descovers how to cope, and Bill Weasley helps him heal his wounds.
1. Denial

**1. Denial**

_Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything...death is not...It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back...a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound...   
Tom Stoppard_

Remus still set the breakfast table for two, Bill noticed when he came into Headquarters early one morning. He still set out Sirius' favourite towel and a fresh, sharp razor every day right before noon. He still set out a teacup and a tea bag every afternoon before he disappeared into the Black family library.

All this for Sirius.

He still talked to him, too, like he was there in the room with him. Bill heard Remus at night, when he settled into bed alone. "Are you comfortable, Sirius?" Remus whispered to no one. Bill could imagine the frown that was surely ghosting over Remus' face when Sirius did not answer.

Bill heard nothing and strained his ears, nearly pressing his face against the door. Remus sighed. "I love you, Sirius," he muttered. Somehow Bill knew that was that and made his way as silently as he could to his own room.

The next morning Bill followed Remus on his errands like a man possessed. He followed him to the post office, to the apothecary, and to the little Muggle convenience store three blocks from Headquarters that sold Mars Bars.

He followed Remus to the grocer, where Remus almost tried to tie off Padfoot's lead on a street lamp. That frown crossed his face again but he shook it off and pushed open the door, leaving Bill across the street on a bench to wait.

Dumbledore came round that afternoon with a goblet full of foul smelling muck. He put his free hand on Remus' back and led him into the library. Bill felt something bubble up inside him but he wasn't quite sure was it was so he squashed it down and jumped when he heard the soft clank of china against marble.

Bill didn't even realise he'd pulled down Sirius' teacup off the top shelf until it clanked against the counter top. He pulled his other hand away from the canister of teabags and shivered a little before heading out of the kitchen to wait.

Dumbledore stopped by every day that week, and each time he brought a goblet full of the foul, green, mucky potion. He and Remus spent hours in the library, doing Merlin knows what. Bill had tried to eavesdrop once, but Remus was nothing if not quiet and Dumbledore was nothing if not vague, so he didn't hear much of anything. After a few tries he gave in and spent his afternoons playing chess against himself, eyes flickering back to the door every few seconds like he was daring it to open.

As Dumbledore left early Friday he stopped by Bill on the sofa and smiled softly at him. "Do not worry yourself with Remus, Bill," he said to the red-headed boy. "He's still trying to adjust."

Bill rather thought it was about time Remus adjusted.


	2. Anger

**2: Anger**

_Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.   
Louis L'Amour_

The full moon comes that night and Bill doesn't realise until he hears Remus screaming why Dumbledore left early. He spends the night pacing in front of the door to the root cellar, cringing at every howl and wondering why a sedate wolf is so enraged.

Morning comes creeping over the rooftops in London around Grimmauld Place, but the moon has not yet set so Bill potters around the kitchen, making tea and an omelet, and waiting. He sets the breakfast table for three.

The moon sets much too late for Bill's liking and he heads over to the root cellar door, waiting for the wards around it to fall and Remus to come out, a bit worse for the wear and dead tired. But time passes and Remus doesn't come out of the root cellar. The wards don't drop and Bill has to pull them down himself. He feels kind of anxious.

The steps that lead down to the dingy root cellar creak underneath him and he hearsbarelya muffled moan. A whispered _lumos_ is all it takes for Bill to see what he fears the most in the back of his mind. Blood is everywhere and, it seemed, so is Remus. His ragged clothes are tossed haphazardly around the room, his wand snapped_snapped_!clear in half on the dirt in front of where Remus is sprawled out, bloodied and broken.

Bill bites back a shriek and sprints up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

Madam Pomfrey promises Bill several times that Remus will make it. Bill wants to believe her, he really does, but the root cellar is coated in blood and Remus is still pale and shaking.

Bill keeps a vigil by Remus' bedside for the week he's unconscious. In the back of his head, and sometimes out loud, Bill wonders if this is what it was like when the Potters died. Did Remus' demons eat him alive then, like they are right now, in front of his eyes?

Madam Pomfrey comes every day and forces potions down Remus' throat because if she doesn't, she tells Bill one lazy afternoon, he'll die of starvation.

For some reason, Bill thinks Remus might like it better that way. And he thinks, too, that he'd mourn for Remus like Remus is mourning for Sirius.

Bill comes home on Friday night from an Order meeting and finds Remus in the kitchen, awake and alert. He looks just fine, not like he'd been fighting for his life unconscious in a bed only hours ago. He must have seen the look on Bill's face, because he smiles a little and tells Bill that it happens all the time.

He nods at Remus and notices a box by his feet. He spots a picturethe one that he'd noticed a thousand times on the bedside tableand a bunch of pictures and papers. He asks Remus if he's going through old things.

Remus tells him it's just trash and asks if Bill will please take it out to the curb, or burn it. Bill nods to Remus and takes it instead to the drawing room on the fourth floor. He puts it in the closet, because he knows that Remus isn't right in the head.

He creeps back down the stairs as silently as he could manage. When he hits the landing at the bottom, he cringes at the creek and trains his ears on Remus' soft voice.

"None of this would have happened if you weren't so fucking _stupid_, Sirius," he says. "I was ready to forgive you until Moony ripped me to shreds and then I realised that you were just a rash, foolish man that never grew up." 

Bill slumps against the wall and he hears something that sounds like a cross between a choked sob and a mirthless laugh. "It doesn't matter now, does it?" he says. "You're dead, and a bit of a good riddance, too." Bill hears a teacup shatter into a million pieces. Somehow he knows it's the red and gold one with a little chip in the top. Sirius' teacup.

After Remus goes to bed that night Bill sneaks into the kitchen and mutters _reparo_. He hopes that everything will look better in the morning.


	3. Bargaining

**3: Bargaining  
**  
_There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.  
Friedrich Nietzsche  
_  
Bill spent two months crawling through ditches and wondering if Remus ate three square meals a day. It was late August by the time he was let off duty and told he could return back home; back to headquarters and back to Remus. He'd started referring to headquarters as home sometime after he began waking up twisted in sweaty, sticky sheets with Remus' name caught in his throat.

His father had asked him if he'd been having nightmares once. Bill hadn't known how to answer. But none of that mattered right then, because Bill was on his way back home, where the breakfast table was always set for two and once a month a werewolf prowled the root cellar.

It was a particularly hot day when Bill returned home. The stifling dead air inside 12 Grimmauld Place almost choked him. It smelled so strongly of potions he could taste it. Something was brewing, in more ways than one.

He made his way to the kitchen, following the heady scent of the potion-in-progress. Stopping in the doorway, he looked at the scene before his eyes.

Remus was never much of a potions master, and right then it was the most apparent thing in the world. He was frazzled but determined and had such a look on his face that Bill was convinced he was trying to improve on the Wolfsbane Potion or something.

He looked up from his spell book and smiled at Bill. "Welcome back," he said and then his attention was on the tome in front of him again. Bill felt somewhat neglected.

Bill sidled around Remus towards the fridge. "Is there anything to drink?"

Remus considered, like he hadn't been in the fridge for days. "I think so. Harry bought some juice the day before yesterday."

"Harry's here?" Remus seemed a bit better than he'd been before Bill'd left. Maybe he'd finally gotten over the whole mess.

A nod. "Just upstairs. Oh!" he turned back to the book in a hurry before stirring his potion and muttering a couple words over the cauldron. Bill looked pathetically at the spellotaped wand Remus was clutching so tight his knuckles were white before heading up the stairs to see Harry.

Around five, when Remus was usually setting out dinner, Bill made his way down to the kitchen. The potion was simmering on the stove and the spell book lay open and abandoned on the kitchen counter. Curious, Bill bent over to see what Remus was doing and bit back a scream.

_Vol de mort_

Voldemort? What in the name of Merlin was Remus doing with anything bearing that name?

Bill read on.

_Though its success is shady at best, the vol de mort spell was especially popular in old France during the time of the Plague. Wizardkind and Muggles alike would call on village medicine men to cast the spell over their dead relatives. The spell is, obviously, meant to revive the victim. There are scattered reports of success, but none of the prescribed methods have done much more than make sparks in any laboratory test._

It hit him. Remus was trying to resurrect Sirius. He stepped back from the book and out of the room, wondering what he should do about it.

Bill went to bed that night without supper.


	4. Depression

**4. Depression  
**  
_"The simple solution for disappointment depression: get up and get  
moving. Physically move. Do. Act. Get going."  
Peter McWilliams_

Remus had not come out of his room for days. Bill had haunted the hallway, waiting right outside Remus' door for some indication the man inside was still alive. Bill sat in his chair, staring up at the ornate ceiling of the novel house of Black, thinking carefully about all that had happened since the day he'd found Remus brewing the _vol de mort_ potion boiling on the cook stove of Mrs. Black's decrepit old kitchen.

Harry had come and gone, back to school and back to his friends. Remus had brewed his potion again and again, refusing to believe that his bargain with god would not work. He was offering all of him, poisoning himself with the silver slivers he had to put into it every night, and even then all the gods in this world would not listen.

Finally, Remus had given up. Two weeks after Bill had found the putrid green _vol de mort_ potion on the stove; Remus had thrown away his cauldron and said a pleasant good night to Bill. That had been a week ago. As far as Bill could tell, he had not left the room since then.

If Remus did not extricate himself from his room today, Bill had resolved that he would go inside. Fuck sanctity. Remus' health was at risk here; he had to grow up and get over this. All these months languishing and lamenting about Sirius... he'd lived thirteen years without him, for god's sake.

Around midnight, just as Bill was drifting off into another night of restless sleep, the door to Remus' bedroom swung open. Remus, unshaven and unclean, made his way across the hallway with Sirius' towel tucked under his arm and Sirius' razor clutched in his fist.

"Remus?" Bill asked sleepily. "That you?"

Remus jumped and spun to stare at him, his amber eyes more vacant than Bill had ever seen. "Aye, Bill. It's me."

"Are you OK?"

A smile flickered across Remus' face. "Would you believe me if I said yes?"

Bill shook his head. "You look like shit."

"I feel like shit."

Bill tightened his ponytail. "Do you, um, want a hand with anything?"

Remus looked thoughtful for a second. "I think," he said so seriously Bill didn't know if he was joking or not, "that I can manage to shower myself. Although I wouldn't mind someone changing my sheets."

When Bill pulled the sheets off of Remus' bed, he found it was hard to miss the stains that littered them - blood and semen everywhere. What was the old man doing to himself? Why wouldn't he let Bill in?

Remus came back from his shower clean-shaven and smelling like the soap Sirius always used to use. "We should talk, Remus."

Remus laughed a little and shook his head. "No, Bill, we don't. I know what you're going to say."

"How do you know?" he asked, settling into the chair beside Remus' bed.

"I can't read minds, but I can see inside some people sometimes. I can see inside you. You're angry that Sirius stole my soul."

"Why would I be angry about that?"

Remus pulled the sheet down and slipped between them, pulling them up to his chest and settling back with a giant tome in his lap. "Because you wanted it for yourself."

Bill was silent. He wasn't going to lie. For months he'd been obsessed with every part of Remus - mind, body, soul, and that damned wolf inside, too.

"You want it for yourself and your angry that Sirius still owns it, that I can't move past him and on to you." Remus pulled his glasses off and set them on the bedside table. "Bill, I'm too old and too tired to fall in love again."

Bill wordlessly stood from the chair and made his way across the room to Remus. "You're never too old to fall in love again," he said, and without any hesitance, pressed his lips against Remus', falling into a kiss he'd been anticipating for a long, long time.


End file.
